Tag Archives: Crystal Clear Creators

If you like your poetry served up with a large slice of what one might term ‘gritty northern realism’, then this next pamphlet is for you. Behind door 16 we turn to…

‘Citizen Kaned’ by Andrew Graves, Published by Crystal Clear Creators

Crystal Clear Creators is a not-for-profit arts organisation based in the East Midlands, devoted to developing, producing, publishing and promoting new writing. It records, produces and broadcasts spoken-word material; it publishes anthologies and pamphlets of new writing; it runs dayschools and courses on creative writing, media and heritage; and it hosts live events, including readings. It works with new, up-and-coming and established writers, actors and producers, as well as other partner organisations.

They also currently run a literary magazine, called Hearing Voices, the first four issues of which can be purchased from their website.

‘Citizen Kaned’ by Andrew Graves is collection of work more often seen on the stage, under Graves’ performance name ‘MulletProof’. Reviewer, Matthew Herbert, advises however, that “there’s far more scope for enjoyment if Citizen Kaned is read without such preconceptions.”

“Rhythms and rhymes gallop through these deft observations on the inherent incongruence of life in Nottingham, yet there are also underlying layers of subtlety. Rather than using clichés as lazy shortcuts, Graves is capable of turning expressions upside down. Witness this line from ‘Ceremony’:

their love spins round like kebab-house meat

Graves then completes the poem by summoning a sense of beautiful grottiness:

they emerge embarrassed, wasted and sweaty
to shower in the headlights and raindrop confetti.”

There are those who won’t like this pamphlet, but if you’re into the stage/page cross over then I think you’ll like this. Just the snippets I’ve read certainly made the rainy northern/midland-ish town I grew up in jump straight back into view!